How to use Cobalt Strike’s Beacon with Veil

Raphael Mudge recently made a great post on how to deliver and execute Beacon on a targeted machine with the metasploit framework. What’s great is that the Veil-Evasion framework also supports the creation of an executable that will act as a stager for Beacon right out of the box! We figured it would be worthwhile to show how to do this with one of Veil’s payloads. You can follow this guide or use the post that Raffi made as it follows nearly identical steps.

To begin, we want to start up Cobalt Strike and set up a Beacon listener on any port, in this case, we’ll use a http Beacon on port 80.

With our handler setup, it’s important to look at the CobaltStrike console and note the location of the beacon dll that we will be using. You should see something like this:

Once we have this info, let’s drop into Veil-Evasion. Basically we can choose any Veil payload type. In this instance, I’ll use python/FlatInjection. We don’t need to do anything special at this moment, just give Veil the “generate” command.

This next section is where we will point to our beacon listener. The payload we want to use is windows/dllinject/reverse_http. After that, provide Veil with the IP and port that your beacon listener is setup to use. One thing to note, is we will need to add in an “extra” option, which is the location of our dll (which we received earlier). Our console should look similar to the following:

After generating your shellcode, just provide a name for the executable, and you should be good to go. Simply take the executable and drop it onto your target/victim system by any means necessary. After getting it on the machine, and executing the payload, you should see your Beacon start checking in.

If you have any questions on this, be sure to let us know, hit us up on twitter, leave a comment, or submit a github issue if needed. Otherwise, hope this helps and don’t get caught!